Toxic Man-Made Chemicals Found In Great Barrier Reef Turtles

Toxic Cocktail of Man-Made Chemicals Found in Great Barrier Reef Turtles.

Green Sea Turtles in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef are some of the world’s most majestic creatures. They have a lifespan of up to 50 years, but after recent results from blood tests on the marine animals, their health might be in jeopardy.

Man-made substances and chemicals are contaminating the ocean and, consequently, sea turtles. After testing Green Turtles’ bloodstream in various locations along the 1,400 mile stretch of the reef, researchers from the University of Queensland found that the turtles had a wild cocktail of common drugs like milrinone for heart problems and allopurinol for gout, household cleaning products, cosmetics and hundreds of thousands of other industrial chemicals like pesticides and herbicides in their systems.

“The worrying thing is there are more chemicals we could not identify than chemicals we could,” said Amy Heffernan, co-author of the study. “There is one new chemical registered for use every six seconds, so the libraries and the databases that we use to identify these chemicals just can’t keep up.”